


and the stream flows red (with the blood of all those left behind)

by crickets



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-15
Updated: 2007-12-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 05:56:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crickets/pseuds/crickets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kara waits for Leoben.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and the stream flows red (with the blood of all those left behind)

**Author's Note:**

> Words, 700. [Original Post](http://crickets.livejournal.com/96757.html).

There's a gnarled grey tree at the end of a muddy road in a place they call Kansas. Today, it rains, dark clouds overhead, but Kara still remembers the way. You see, _she's been here before_.

 

**+**

 

No one believes her. Even Lee, when the path is darkest, leaves her side. She knows what they think she is, and _frak_, if she weren't _her_, if she hadn't _lived it_, she'd think it too.

She also knows they mean to kill her. Whispers carry, and when citizens of the fleet, people she's never met, start hearing, trusting, and believing the words of the one they used to call _Starbuck_, she knows her time has come. There is no trial - not after Tori, the Chief, and even Sam. (He did try to warn her though, she must admit.) Especially not after Tigh.

They've learned their lesson. (And the Old Man just isn't the Old Man anymore.)

 

**+**

 

She dreams of water, streams and riverbanks, Leoben's voice in her head.

_What is the most basic article of faith?_

_This is not all that we are._

_See, the difference between you and me is that I know what that means and you don't. I know that I'm more than this body, more than this consciousness. A part of me swims in the stream, but in truth, I'm standing on the shore. The current never takes me downstream._

She tried to drown him once. _It hadn't worked._ Instead she drowned in him; in the truth of his words. Which, if she's honest, she understood, even then.

Now, she lies curled in her cell, alone and cold, and still her, all human, muscle and bone. And when she dies (and she will), there will be no awakening. Not like there is for him, anyway. Of that, she is sure.

(But nights, she still prays.)

 

**+**

 

Leoben comes to her before the execution, not in her dreams or in the flesh, but in a message delivered by one Anastasia Dualla, the last ally she'd ever expect.

"They're wrong about you," she says in that empty way of hers, simple, true, and reaches through the bars, drops a slip of paper into Kara's hand. "And we'll all burn because of it."

When she's alone again, Kara reads those words, scrawled in tiny print, over and over again.

_Meet me by the tree, L._

 

**+**

 

They come at night.

Alarms sound and then quiet again, but outside she knows the blackness of space is lit up with fire. It is only later that she hears the fight grow nearer, the sound of shouts, and shots, and people dying, and the pounding of boots on metal floor.

After, in the causeway, she finds Adama, bloody on the ground, and kneels beside him. "Come with me," she pleads, places a hand over the gaping wound, cradles him in her arms.

"No," he rasps, shaking with near-death. "It's finished, Starbuck," using her call sign. "Go, _find Earth_." And then, before the end, "I should have trusted you."

 

**+**

 

Life on this new world is not unlike life on Caprica. (Except the path was paved in blood.)

She takes shelter under the sycamore, leans against the bark, clothes soaked through, and she remembers New Caprica. She remembers Leoben's blood on her hands, Adama's in Galactica, Sam's too — her own. And every time it was the same; warm, and red, and full of life soon taken. She had buried Leoben so many times, with her bare hands even, expecting to find some truth about his nature, some clue that might give away the ultimate cylon secret. She found none, just more of the same. And soon she came to realize that life is _life_, that you bury the dead and wash your hands clean, sullying the stream that flows on without you in a deep red, and wait by the shore.

She feels his shadow over her before he speaks. Leoben Conoy, the last of his kind, and yet a person, whole and true.

 

_—fin_


End file.
